Death of the timetable forecast

The death of the timetable, with public transport supply flexibly matched to demand, was the prospect offered by Chris Cooper, Industry Architect, Travel and Transport with IBM. The company’s travel information hub (TIH) concept, he told a session on information and integration, is ready for the marketplace, to provide mobile and web access to information on fixed and moving transport assets.

US IBM researchers have teamed up with the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) to develop the Smart Traveler system. This uses authenticated travellers’ journey capture to give intelligent predictive notifications via SMS, traffic alerts on Caltrans’ 511 one-stop phone and web travel information source, email, and Atom or RSS feeds for morning travel condition reports.

London’s new Countdown II iBus information system, via web (desktop, mobile and accessibility-optimised), SMS and at-stop signs is: “radically different in scale from previous implementations”, said Tim Johnson, Product Manager at developers Trapeze TPI. It covers 19,000 stops and 8,500 buses, supporting six million journeys a day on 700 routes.

Johnson stressed the importance, starting from Transport for London specification, of an “evolutionary, agile process”, characterised by a “healthy tension between creativity and delivery focus”. Launched on 17 October, Countdown II is regularly exceeding 30,000 hits an hour with close to 90 per cent of use being mobile, reported Tim Johnson.

Germany is committing €25 million to a ‘door-to-door’ research programme aimed at giving passengers continuous journey guidance, announced Berthold Radermacher, Head of Standardisation at German transit organisation VDV.